Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an integral part of the information needed to establish and explain how a company will move forward to meet its marketing and business goals.
Their quantitative, practical nature are fundamental in measuring how well a company is meetings its strategic and operational objectives and it’s easy to lose yourself in those numbers. That’s why we need to think beyond our KPIs and take into account the ultimate drivers of our business –our customers.
As marketers, we need to better serve customers by delivering value rather than bombarding people and hoping there’s a portion of people who want what we’re bombarding them with.
As an industry, we need to increasingly act strategically and educate ourselves, as opposed to relying on tactics to attain our goals.
Sounds straightforward right? But think back to all the times you deleted countless emails that didn’t have anything to do with you or ignored that straightforward sales-pitched ad. Some things simply do not resonate with you. And it’s the same with every brand out there, if it doesn’t resonate with people, they won’t give it the time of the day. Ask yourself this: What are you doing and why are you doing it?
Brand Mission and Purpose in the Age of the Customer
As a marketer, your job is to advance your brand story and serve your customers. If you think of your job merely along the lines of driving your KPIs, you might need to rethink your objectives.
Nowadays, we are living in what Forrester has coined the Age of the Customer, and this has lead to different expectations from us.
This is the age of empowerment. Customers are becoming entitled customers who expect high-value experiences on a consistent basis, regardless of channel or platform. Traditional marketing campaigns on their own are inefficient at meeting these demands.
The challenge lies in aligning highly personalized outbound communications with customer-oriented inbound interactions throughout the buyer’s journey.
Ultimately, brands must not only win customers in their moments of need, but they must also synergize their brand’s mission and purpose with their customers’ values and beliefs. Nowadays brand purpose is going to motivate more decisions than ever before.
With the increase of Campaigns like Iceland’s recent #NoPalmOilChristmas, which went viral on social media after being banned on TV, brands are expected to invest more in their customers’ emotional drivers.
To secure the brand’s success, marketers must optimize real-time analytics and insights to organize contextually relevant experiences. While campaigns aren’t dead, they need to evolve and make sure these experiences are immersive, engaging and frictionless.
Social media certainly facilitates campaigns in delivering immersive and engaging experiences. Through Instagram, woman’s brand Aerie pledged to donate $1 to the National Eating Disorders Associations (NEDA) for every untouched bathing suit photo shared by users. The brand mission is “to empower all women to love their real selves”. In 2017 they raised more than $10,000 and the best part? They are still at present carrying out this highly popular campaign.
Above all, marketers have to think of their customers first, not their marketing goals. When we talk about putting strategic planning before tactical planning, the strategy should prioritize this question: “What are we doing to help customers make a choice?”
3 Ways Marketers Must Serve Their Customers
Here are three ways we can be of service without waiting for things to fail:
Marketers Must Serve Their Followers, Customers, and Audiences by Using Technology
Some of the biggest changes in marketing include the access to data about our customers, the technology we need to communicate with them, and the cost of that action, whether in advertising expenses or contacts with the customer.
These three things lend themselves to the marketer gaining access to tools that in turn enhance marketing abilities, tactics, and strategies. Some of the most basic data-tracking tools are free and widely available such as Google Analytics and Facebook and Instagram’s built-in analytical tools.
The limitless options may seem overwhelming but you can’t shy away from the advancements of marketing technology that will essentially drive your business forward in this day and age.
We have an intrinsic responsibility to utilize these tools to create and send more relevant messages.
Marketers Must Serve Their Own Practices by Consistently Learning More About What They Do
Do you get a little smarter and more informed about marketing every day on the job? Do you use LinkedIn like Instagram (log in, like something, log out) or as a source of information that can lead to contacts and ideas?
Take at least an hour a week to deepen your relationship with the marketing world, whether you read up marketing news or blogs, listen to webinars and podcasts or attend in-person conferences and events.
This serves your customers because the smarter and more educated we get as marketers, the better we can engage with people who entrusted their social media newsfeeds or email addresses to us.
Digital marketing is always evolving, so if we don’t continuously push ourselves in new directions, we fail.
Marketers Must Serve Themselves to Gain Fulfilment
This is an appeal to marketers who aren’t satisfied with their job, who like automatons, go through the motions of the job and follow what they’re told.
Read more. Learn more. Connect more. Try new things, not only to benefit your job but to improve your sense of fulfillment and self-worth.
Always be willing to question. Make it a habit of asking “why?” and “why not?”
All these questions are aimed at improving not only your marketing strategy but also at serving your customers better and that comes back to the company in more sales and less churn.
Some Final Words
This customer-driven era is all about building the best relationship you can with consumers, and to do so you need to know how the best serve them and go the extra mile. KPIs will always be essential but do not let your vision be limited to them alone. Creating quality content, and having content strategy is best relationship builder.
Serving customers in the ways mentioned above is all about taking advantage of the wealth of opportunity in the industry.
Our digital marketing team is committed to getting you a wider audience that will engage and commit further to your brand.
